“That distance thing: I hadn’t thought of that before. Actually, my
mom was always referring to herself as “the mom.” “...I am the
mom who works her ass off every damn day...and when the mom comes home and wants
an orange she should be able to have one...” I don’t detect any distance
in her remark, however. Still, it does sort of work in an unintentional way. Freud
would be pleased, I think.”
—Duff Brenna,
commenting on 11 July 2012 in
response to
Dennis Moore’s review in East County Magazine
Reviews: Murdering the Mom
5-Star Review at Amazon.com, 29 June 2012:
“A Wonderful Memoir”
In Murdering the Mom: A Memoir, Brenna reaches deep into the darkest recesses
of the human psyche. All too often parents treat their children, the very ones they’re
supposed to love most and protect, with anger and selfishness, violence and neglect,
and Brenna, the child, is indeed a victim of circumstance. But Brenna, the man,
is not. No one escapes this world unscathed, but in Brenna’s case it’s
something of a miracle, given his upbringing, that this memoir wasn’t written
from Death Row. With great skill, insight, wisdom, introspection, and above all
a sense of humanity and forgiveness, a brilliant writer transcends the tragic and
turns this powerful, raw, heartfelt story into the finest art.
—James Brown, author of
The Los Angeles Diaries and This River
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Duff Brenna’s childhood and coming of age are as harrowing as Maxim Gorki’s,
but where Gorki’s vision calls for a Soviet revolution to free underclasses
from the cycle of brutality, Brenna’s celebrates our common humanity, complexity,
and resilience, the revolution within. His accounts of being brutalized and loved
by his stepfather are both horrific and comic. This is a memoir remarkable for its
ironic acceptance of outrages....
—
DeWitt Henry, author of Safe Suicides and Sweet Dreams:
A Family History
From Guest Review
in Oronte Churm’s blog
at Inside Higher Ed, April 25, 2012
This, I think, above all, is Brenna’s grand achievement here. He is not settling
old scores—and god knows there were scores he might well have wanted to settle
if he’d a mind to. But no, he is exploring—unsparingly, unflinchingly,
but above all fairly, with balance and breathtaking honesty—the humanity of
a group of people born into and continually creating a kind of hell in which they
thrash around without a clue as to how to get out.
—Thomas E. Kennedy,
author of 30 books, including novels, essay and story collections, literary
criticism, and translation
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From a personal note to Brenna (used by permission)
Powerful and searing book.... Horrific & scary adolescence, brutal &
intense.... Astonishing, anguishing, horrifying & a delicious read...
those last scenes terribly moving.
—Steve Kowit, author
of In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet’s Portable Workshop
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From ForeWord
Reviews:
“a memoir that’s a truly striking
accomplishment”
There are some memoirs that seem so artful in the dissection of the joys and horrors
of a life that they resonate long after that last page. Duff Brenna provides just
such a story....
...like many people recalling wrenching childhoods, his emotions surged with ferocity
and he was left to ponder the truly momentous questions of life and, especially,
of love. He writes “[B]ut love changes—it evolves, the purity of it
becoming perverse mixtures of love and adoration, hatred and jealousy, tenderness,
passion, devotion, loathing. What was left of those tumultuous emotions? I couldn’t
sort it out. I still can’t sort it out.”
Even with this admission, though, Brenna provides a compelling attempt to untangle
the emotional threads of his childhood. By viewing his past with such a sense of
honesty and compassion, he delivers a memoir that’s a truly striking
accomplishment.
—Elizabeth Millard
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